Two Maine Polls Just Dropped. Is It Time to Fret About Graham Platner?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://newrepublic.com/article/212683/maine-senate-polls-graham-platner

Two major polls of the Maine Senate race dropped this week, and they told the same story: The race is incredibly close, and Democrat Graham Platner has real work to do among the working class. He’s running an aggressively left-populist, antiestablishment campaign targeting the billionaire class—and boasts lots of blue-collar appeal—but GOP Senator Susan Collins is way ahead among those voters. Why?

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But note this: In the Times poll, Platner trails among voters without a college degree, a proxy for the working class, by 37–58. In the Fox poll, that’s 41–56. What’s driving this? One possibility: The Times poll has working-class voters saying Platner has “good character” by 37–57 and “the right kind of moral values” by 36–57.

On the plus side, Platner leads in the Times survey among women by 52–44, among young people by 59–32, and among college-educated voters by 66–32. But Platner’s candidacy is all about his blue-collar aura: He’s a tattooed oyster farmer who speaks openly—in that deep, gravelly voice—about his trauma from serving in combat. Though his backstory is somewhat more privileged (his father is an Ivy League graduate and lawyer), he speaks in a left-populist idiom that seeks to connect with working people’s struggles. So his numbers among them are concerning.

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Asked to respond to Platner’s struggles with working people, Adam Green, the head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee—an early booster of Platner’s candidacy—acknowledged that he has more work to do among them. But he cast this as an opportunity. “Most working-class people who are low-propensity voters don’t know him yet,” Green said. “But once they do, he’s an obvious fit for them.”